"It was not just a house, it was a future." Week after week, millions of Americans tuned in to the "People Are Funny" radio show in 1948 as contestants tried to solve a riddle and win just about the grandest prize imaginable: a new house, the first in the glittering new Los Angeles suburb named Panorama City. No matter that this "scientifically planned" suburb was just a vast, dusty construction site amid dairy farms and orange groves in the largely undeveloped northern San Fernando Valley.

For decades it has struggled along as the Rodney Dangerfield of Los Angeles. Dismissed as urbanized sprawl and best known to some for its porn shoots and failed secession efforts, the San Fernando Valley never seems to get any respect when it's compared to the rest of Los Angeles. "In the past it's gotten the short end of the stick as far as its history is concerned. Things just disappear," said Tommy Gelinas, who owns a T-shirt printing plant in North Hollywood and has a lifelong fascination with the Valley.

Anxious to preserve the San Fernando Valley's history since the 1920s, a Mission Hills-based organization is undertaking an oral history project to record the recollections of Valley pioneers before they are lost forever. The San Fernando Valley Historical Society will interview about a dozen longtime residents, civic leaders and politicians who may recall the time when the Valley was carpeted with orange groves or when Tarzana was known as Runnymede.

Fred, Barney, Wilma, Pebbles and Bam-Bam would dig this place. Enough big rocks to coax any caveman--or woman--out of a dark abode and into a charming tract home hewn from hefty granite boulders. And, hey, we'll even throw in a Ford Model T in your new garage. Forget the Pleistocene era, this was 1924, and developer "Pep" Rempp was eager to market his lovely stone cottages in Roscoe--or what is now known as Sun Valley.

Those who scoff and call the idea of San Fernando Valley history an oxymoron clearly have never stayed long. Even the most cursory tour--from the front seat of a car, for instance--reveals myriad street names--Lankershim, Mulholland, Van Nuys or Chandler, perhaps--honoring the long-dead barons whose politics and conniving were every bit as compelling as those of the royal courts. And closer observation--astride a favorite pony, maybe--reveals a rich unwritten past.

Logging and wheat enterprises made Albert Workman a rich man, but it was a small grove of eucalyptus trees that secured his place in San Fernando Valley history. Workman planted what some say were the first eucalyptus trees in Southern California on the West Valley ranch that bore his name. The ranch's main house is now the centerpiece of Shadow Ranch Park in West Hills. The house, heavily damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, will finally be repaired with $1.

The legend of the King of Cowboys lives on in the rocky crags of the hills here. Even though Roy Rogers moved from the San Fernando Valley more than three decades ago, his mark is still visible, particularly at the sprawling pink ranch house at the top of Trigger Street. Once a 300-acre ranch, most of the property is now developed with luxury custom homes, many with commanding views of the Valley below.

Moments in San Fernando Valley History 1797: San Fernando Mission is founded, 28 years after the first Spanish expedition of the San Fernando Valley made its way into the Valley via Sepulveda Pass. California will become part of Mexico 25 years later. 1834: The San Fernando Mission is secularized, and Andres Pico Adobe, named for the Mexican general, is built nearby.

It was not only the biggest quake in San Fernando Valley history at the time, but it was the first strong one in the Valley since 1893. In fact, the area where the fault broke had been the locale of only 10 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater in the previous 37 years. But at 42 seconds after 6 a.m. on a Tuesday morning 25 years ago this week, Feb.

On Aug. 5, 1769, a short, pale Franciscan missionary named Juan Crespi looked northward from about where Mulholland Drive now spans the San Diego Freeway, across the San Fernando Valley, then a trackless bowl of wild grass dotted here and there with oak and sycamore trees.

Lucas Morvo, rambling down Lankershim Boulevard on his way to buy hot purple hair dye, knows his way around the thrift stores of North Hollywood. But ask him about the broken-down train station at the end of the block, and the teenager shrugs. "I don't know it," he says, his long hair brushing the metal spikes on his dog collar as he cranes his neck for a peek at the century-old building. "And I hang out here a lot."

A group of schoolchildren got a real-life history lesson Thursday as they watched archeologists unearth a portion of a historic adobe's foundation at Campo de Cahuenga. The ruins are beneath a parking lot next to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Red Line subway station now being built on Lankershim Boulevard across from Universal Studios. According to historians, the adobe is where an 1847 peace agreement was signed ending the Mexican War in California.

Perhaps the world's most famous collection of suburbs, the San Fernando Valley is truly a child of the 20th century. Born of an epic engineering feat, its growth was tied to some of the most romantic of American endeavors this century: aviation, movies, the automobile and space flight. At mid-century, it fulfilled the postwar dream of suburban life, then went through a sometimes reluctant transition to urbanism.

Inscribed on a wall in a private jet terminal at Burbank Airport are the names of 36 test pilots for Lockheed's famed Skunk Works. Hailed as heroes, they were the first to fly some of the world's most advanced military aircraft sculpted in secrecy at the Skunk Works from 1942 to 1992. In Lockheed's vast factories nearby, nearly 10,000 P-38 fighters were assembled for battle in World War II.

Earlier in the decade, The Times had a contest to rename the San Fernando Valley. Among the wry proposals were Suburbank and Beige-Air. But the winner was Twentynine Malls. We know that shopping pre-dates the settlement of the Valley, but it is here that shopping acquired celebrity. Given how much of the entertainment industry is Valley-based, it is probably inevitable that local institutions, including the dozen or so area malls, have a tendency to become full-fledged cultural icons.

Before World War II, the San Fernando Valley had no public colleges but plenty of fields and livestock. "There was a real question whether the Valley would ever reach a population to merit a state college. That now seems, in retrospect, absurd," said John Broesamle, a history professor at Cal State Northridge and author of "Suddenly a Giant: A History of California State University Northridge."

The sun is drying away the morning haze, giving itself a clear view of Ann Bothwell's bit of living history. It's burnishing the dark green leaves of the 1,987 trees and settling in the pores of the hard infant fruit. Thus begins another day in what is believed to be the last commercial orange grove in the San Fernando Valley. Two-thirds of a century ago, citrus groves covered 15,000 acres of the Valley.

Earlier in the decade, The Times had a contest to rename the San Fernando Valley. Among the wry proposals were Suburbank and Beige-Air. But the winner was Twentynine Malls. We know that shopping pre-dates the settlement of the Valley, but it is here that shopping acquired celebrity. Given how much of the entertainment industry is Valley-based, it is probably inevitable that local institutions, including the dozen or so area malls, have a tendency to become full-fledged cultural icons.

Throughout the 20th century, the San Fernando Valley has been no stranger to natural disasters. Earthquakes, fires, floods--the region has seen them all, often with horrific outcomes. The most damaging to property was the Northridge earthquake that struck with a 6.7 magnitude on Jan. 17, 1994. The temblor killed 57 people, injured nearly 12,000 others and caused more than $40 billion in property damage, still the costliest disaster in U.S. history.

Long before the Valley Girl entered pop culture, the San Fernando Valley gained fame for its housing--vast tracts of single-family ranch-style homes that came to epitomize a suburbia where even the middle class could have backyard swimming pools. For the first half of the century, much of the Valley was still dusty ranchland, but after World War II subdivisions began to fill in the landscape. All the elements seemed to be in place for a housing boom.